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John Calipari entered this season under more pressure than he’s ever faced from Kentucky fans because he A) lost to Saint Peter’s in the first round of the NCAA Tournament last March, B) produced the worst season in modern UK history two years ago, C) hasn’t made a Final Four since 2015, and D) still has just one national title in 13 years at UK despite regularly enrolling recruiting classes that rank tops nationally.
Things have only gotten worse 12 games into this season.
“They beat us pretty good,” Calipari said following Wednesday night’s 89-75 loss at Missouri that dropped Kentucky to 8-4 and 40th in the NET after being No. 1 in KenPom.com’s preseason rankings.
Yikes.
More troubling than the 8-4 record is that the Wildcats are 0-4 against top-45 KenPom teams and just got blasted — they were down 21 in the second half — by a Missouri program that finished 12-21 last season. On that note, shouts to Dennis Gates. The first-year Mizzou coach inherited a mess of a situation but loaded up via the transfer portal and now has a team that’s 12-1 with the lone loss coming to Kansas.
Missouri looks good. Gates seems great.
The big national headline, however, is still that Kentucky will enter January with zero Quadrant 1 wins and even less of an identity. Calipari has neither the type of overwhelming NBA talent he’s normally had at UK, nor an obvious understanding of how to maximize the pieces actually in the program. That’s a bad combination that’s led to a rough start to this season and the removal of the Wildcats from Thursday morning’s updated CBS Sports Top 25 And 1 daily college basketball rankings.
Calipari has always had his critics, sure, but the concerning thing for him now is that his most intense critics are diehard fans of the program he’s running, and that’s never really been the case for him at the collegiate level since he began his head coaching career more than three decades ago.
Is there still time to get things right?
Of course.
But history tells us once your own fans turn on you to this degree it’s difficult to completely win them back over, and the fact that KenPom is now projecting Kentucky to lose eight more times before Selection Sunday suggests that Big Blue Nation will likely spend the next three months just growing more and more disgruntled with a very expensive coach who is finding it harder than ever to meet expectations.
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